Even as other cities over the past several years have scaled back or even abandoned their recycling programs because they couldn’t find a market for the materials, San Francisco’s commitment to recycling has not wavered. Out of the city’s annual 900,000 tons of discarded material, it diverts more for reuse than it sends to landfills—a success that only a few peer cities, such as Seattle, have achieved.
But San Francisco is still far from achieving the goal it set 16 years ago when it pledged it would achieve “zero waste”—and no longer need landfills—by 2020. Today, it’s nowhere close to that goal. No city is. Though it is a leader in the U.S. at recycling and composting, San Francisco is in a predicament common among American cities, whose residents are growing increasingly vexed by their role in creating vast amounts of garbage and their struggle to control where it’s ending up.
The U.S. produces more than 250 million tons of waste per year—30 percent of the world’s waste, though it makes up only 4 percent of the Earth’s population. Sixty-five percent of that waste ends up in landfills or incinerators. Appalled by floating trash zones like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch off California, the public says it wants to stop plastics from polluting the oceans. People say they don’t want to burn garbage if it creates toxic air pollutants, and they don’t want any more landfill mountains. But if you’re a city official, crafting a waste-disposal system that is financially and environmentally sustainable is a monumental challenge. What’s different about San Francisco is that it is continuing to push the boundary of what’s possible—leaning on a combination of high tech, behavior modification and sheer political will.
For decades, recycling and composting programs have enjoyed broad political support from San Francisco mayors, legislators and voters. “They’ve always been willing to do things other cities haven’t tried yet,” says Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “They’ve pioneered a lot of programs that either are commonplace everywhere or are going to be soon.”